Short Message Service (SMS) messaging or SMSing, as it is more colloquially known, is fast becoming one of the most common ways that cellular phone users communicate with each other. SMS was first proposed in the fall of 1982 by a Finnish civil servant by the name of Matti Makkonen in a Copenhagen pizzeria during a conference of mobile phone communication technology. From such a humble beginning, the SMS has grown to begin to rival speech as the most common method of communication from a mobile device.
SMS based services are developing rapidly throughout the world. By mid-2004, text messages were being sent at a rate of 500 billion messages every year. At an average cost of 10 cents per SMS message, revenue generated from SMS messages amounts to an excess of 50 billion USD for cellular telephone operators. Moreover, the rate of growth has been rapid. For instance, in 2001, 250 billion short messages were sent, in comparison to year 2000 when just 17 billion messages were sent. SMS is particularly popular in Europe, Asia (excluding Japan and Korea), and Australia. The popularity of SMS is partly being driven by its cost advantage over speech on the cellular phone.
So far, however, the use of SMS is mostly prevalent in the consumer world and has been relatively disconnected from corporate messaging and directory solutions. However, corporate messaging services with their access to a vast directory of users can present a huge opportunity for efficient and timely interchange of information via SMS. Thus, there is a need for marrying SMS messaging to corporate messaging products, such as Microsoft® Exchange Server, thereby making the SMS messaging useful to a much larger group of users.